Flickr flaw flaunted private pics publicly

Flickr is one of the more popular photo sharing services out there. The photo service allows users to upload photographs that anyone can see and to upload photographs privately they can only be viewed by specific users. The photo sharing site recently ran into an issue where photographs marked private were made available to the public.

Flickr notes that it was performing routine site maintenance and identified a bug in software that could have changed the view settings on some photos from private to public. The company says that photos were visible between January 18 and February 7 of 2013. Flickr says that it put additional measures in place to prevent this sort of problem from happening again.

The software problem affected some images uploaded between April and December of 2012. The company says that overall the bug impacted only a small percentage of the photos uploaded to the sharing service. However, Flickr boasts an average of about 1.4 million public photos uploaded daily during 2012 meaning that millions of private photos could have been viewed by the public.

It remains unclear exactly how many users were affected by the bug and some users affected by the bug report that Flickr was unable to tell them if people viewed their private photos. The company set privacy settings for any potentially affected image to private. However, that could mean that photographs people meant to be public are now unavailable for viewing.